The following is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
When I was working at the University of Arizona, it wasn’t the increased traffic that announced the end of summer break. Instead, it was the door handle to my office building.
The handle felt clean during the summer, but come mid-August, I’d grab it and a sweaty, sticky mess would hit my palm. “They’re back,” I’d think, and immediately make sure my department’s super-sized jar of hand sanitizer was full.
Now, imagine the doorknobs at your average elementary school. Makes you want to hustle to the sink for soap and water, doesn’t it?
COVID-19, as everyone except the most extreme deniers now realize, is not the average autumn germ found at school. It’s a random death laser, taking out this person but leaving that one, killing a 30-year-old in Texas after a “COVID-party,” yet sparing my 50-something friend with multiple comorbidities.
Therefore, despite what all Arizonans desperately want, we can’t have in-person schooling this fall. Unless, of course, we’re willing to think outside the box. Or in this case, outside the building.
While there are many unknowns about the coronavirus, the one thing scientists agree on is that the risk of contracting it drops mightily when outside.
Outside is safer for three reasons: wind disperses viral droplets, open space prevents COVID-19 from piling up as “concentrate,” and research shows that sunlight can kill some of it. In a detailed study of 7,000 cases in China — where contract-tracing has been elevated to an art form — only one outbreak involving just two persons was tied to an outdoor environment.
Moreover, fresh-air schools have been used before in the United States to save lives, so we have precedent — and inspiration.
In the early 1900s, when tuberculosis was killing like wildfire, two female Rhode Island physicians proposed outdoor classrooms after hearing of them in Germany. A few months later, outdoor schools were operating in the frigid northeast, keeping tubercular children educated while also preventing them from spreading the disease.
The schools were buildings with the walls knocked out, providing protection from snow and rain but allowing fresh air to blow away deadly germs. The children were freezing, so they were cocooned in something similar to sleeping bags with heated soap stones at their feet.
Arizona students would face excessive heat, not cold, but I’m pretty sure parents, teachers and administrators could be just as creative keeping them cool as teachers in 1908 were at keeping children warm in the harsh Rhode Island winter. Besides, once November hits, Arizona has six full months of glorious outdoor weather.
Denmark and Italy are already utilizing outdoor learning, and France and Canada are doing so partially, so we wouldn’t be flying blind. Additionally, the magazine Science recently studied schools in Europe and Africa that opened in May and found that children under the age of 11 — for reasons no one yet knows — don’t seem to spread COVID.
Based on that, the Danes assigned the youngest elementary children to permanent small groups of three that are allowed to play together during recess and eat together at lunch, addressing the socialization/mental-health issues so many of us are worried about. Each “pod” stays socially distanced from other pods, and no illness has been detected among the pods or in their families.
Unfortunately, teens appear to be hot zones of spread, so in-person learning — even outside — must remain socially distanced.
Or better yet, because children older than 12 are more able to manage virtual learning without help from their already stressed-out working parents, those students could learn from home until we have a vaccine. That would increase the available outdoor space for the 5- to 11-year-olds a gazillion-fold because elementary teachers and students could utilize not only their own schools’ open areas, but the larger spaces at middle and high schools.
Would any of this be perfect? No. Would it be easy? Nope. But is it possible? Absolutely. And it is infinitely safer than putting children inside air-tight buildings with closed ventilation systems.
Arizona is on fire right now — both with COVID and flaming ignorance — and I’m not sure either will lessen anytime soon. The governor has abandoned his previously stated Aug. 17 start date for in-person schooling, and state officials say they are still examining ways to get students back to school.
I encourage them to look to the past to save our schools’ future and bring education outside.
